Users sending text messages are sometimes unaware that long messages
will cost more.
Users sending broadcast messages need to be aware that there’s a
character limit, so they can take this into account when planning their
messages.
This commit adds an endpoint which counts the number of characters in
some template content, and returns a snippet of useful info about how
long the message is.
In subsequent commits we’ll be able to use AJAX to fetch this snippet as
the user types.
There’s a surprising amount of complexity in counting the length of
messages. So we’ll need to do this in Python because it would be too
convoluted to re-implement the length counting in client side code, let
alone ensuring it had parity with its Python equivalent.
As formatters we can use them in Jinja or Python code.
It also means we don’t need to import them every time we want to use
them – they’re always available in the template context.
For now this doesn’t remove the macros, it just aliases them to the
formatters. This gives us confidence that the formatters are working the
same way the old macros did, and reduces the diff size of each commit.
We have lots of functions for converting various types of data into
strings to be displayed to the user somewhere.
This commit collects all these functions into their own module, rather
than having them cluttering up `app/__init__.py` or buried amongst
various other things that have ended up in `app/utils.py`.
